As I expected it would, the fact that I used ZFS compression on
our MySQL volume in my little OpenSolaris experiment struck a
chord in the comments. I chose gzip-9 for our first pass for a
few reasons:

I wanted to see what the “best case” compression ratio was
for our dataset (InnoDB tables)

I wanted to see what the “worst case” CPU usage was for our
workload

I don’t have a lot of time. I need to try something quick
& dirty.

I got both those data points with enough granularity to be
useful: a 2.12X compression ratio over a …

There’s remarkably little information online about using MySQL on ZFS, successfully or not, so I did
what any enterprising geek would do: Built a box, threw some data
on it, and tossed it into production to see if it would sink or
swim.

I’m a Linux geek, have been since 1993 (Slackware!). All of SmugMug’s
datacenters (and our EC2 images) are built on Linux. But the
current state of filesystems on Linux is awful, and …

There’s a nasty problem with Linux 2.6 even when you have a ton
of RAM. No matter what you do, including setting
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness = 0, your OS is going to prefer swapping
stuff out rather than freeing up system cache. On a single-use
machine, where the application is better at utilizing RAM than
the system is, this is incredibly stupid. Our MySQL boxes are a
perfect example – they run only MySQL and we want InnoDB to have
a lot of RAM (32-64GB …

I know I’m a little late to the discussion, but Brian
Aker posted a thought-provoking piece on the imminent death
of MySQL replication to scale reads. His
premise is that memcached is so cool and scales so much better,
that read replication scaling is going to become a think of the
past. Other MySQL community people, like Arjen and Farhan, chimed in too.

Now, I love memcached. We use it as a vital layer in our
datacenters, and we couldn’t live without it. But it’s not
a total solution to all …

The big deal? They’re releasing a Community version that
doesn’t have all the same features as the Enterprise version of
Online Backup, including compression and encryption. The
Community version is open-sourced under GPL, the Enterprise
version is not.

Personally, I think this is awesome. Don’t get me wrong – I love
open source. We couldn’t have built our business without
it, and we love it when we get a chance to contribute back to the
community.

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors
can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what
technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management
solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason
why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the
way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these
“Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard
to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best
management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while
shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the
aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL
Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it
sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who
uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

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